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Quotes  “What luck for the rulers that men do not think.”—Adolf Hitler

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First They Came for the Jews  First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

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Definitions  What is the Holocaust? – The Holocaust is the state-sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

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An Overview  On January 20, 1942 fifteen high ranking Nazi Party and German government leaders met at Wannsee district of Berlin to coordinate the carrying out of the “final solution.”  The leader of the meeting was SS Lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich.

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An Overview  The “Final Solution” was the Nazi regime’s code name for the deliberate, planned mass murder of all European Jews.

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An Overview  Six weeks before the Wannsee meeting, the Nazis began to murder Jews at Chelmno, an agricultural estate located in a part of Poland annexed to Germany.

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An Overview  During 1942, trainloads of Jewish men, women, and children were transported from countries all over Europe to the six major killing centers in German-occupied Poland.

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Summary of the Holocaust 1933-1939  525,000 Jews, less than 1% of the population, lived in Germany.  In 1933 new German laws forced Jews out of civil service jobs, university and law positions, and other areas of public service.  In April 1933, a boycott of Jewish business was instituted.

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February 16—Do you think the Holocaust was inevitable or do you think it could have been prevented? Why?

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1933-1939  In 1935, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg made Jew’s second-class citizens.  These Nuremberg laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to be identified, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents.

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1933-1939  Between 1932 and 1939, anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further.  Between 1933 and 1939, about half the German-Jewish population and more than two-thirds of Austrian Jews fled Nazi persecution.

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1939-1945  On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and WWII began.  Within weeks the Polish army was defeated and the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Polish culture and enslave the Polish people whom they viewed as “subhuman.”

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1939-1945  As the war began in 1939, Hitler initiated an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped, and patients deemed “incurable.”

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1939-1945  In the months following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, Communists, and many Roma (Gypsies) were killed in mass shootings.

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1939-1945  During the war, ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps, in addition to the concentration camps, were created by the Germans to imprison Jews, Roma, and other victims.

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1939-1945  Between 1942 and 1945, the Germans moved to eliminate the ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere.  They deported ghetto residents to “extermination camps”—killing centers equipped with gassing facilities.

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1939-1945  Auschwitz-Birkenau, which also served as a concentration camp, became the killing center were the largest numbers of European Jews and Roma were killed.  The killing centers were operated by the SS.

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1939-1945  There were instances of organized resistance in almost every concentration camp and ghetto.  An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jews fought bravely as partisans in resistance groups.  Organized armed resistance was the most direct form of opposition.

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Obstacles to Resistance  Superior armed power of the Germans  German tactic of “collective responsibility”  Isolation of Jews and lack of weapons  Secrecy and deception of deportations

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1939-1945  By the summer of 1944, the Nazis had emptied all ghettos in eastern Europe and killed most of their former inhabitants.  After the war turned against Germany and the Allied armies approached German soil in late 1944, the SS decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps.

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1939-1945  In May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed, the SS guards fled, and the camps ceased to exist.

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Aftermath of the Holocaust  Following the war, the trials of “major” war criminals was held at the palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany between November 1945 and August 1946.  These trials were conducted by the International Military Tribunal.

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